


Haunted

by magikfanfic



Series: Love Made Manifest [10]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, M/M, Post-Rogue One, blood mentions death mentions basically some in-depth talk of Scarif, i also make up how the Force works because that's my jam, i make up my own canon we die as men, in which Baze has a lot of feelings, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 19:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10646877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: It's raining when they finally arrive on the planet after a long journey in the old and rickety ship that Bodhi and Jyn have spent so much time pouring over, fixing and then tweaking until it probably runs better now than it ever did. Baze should be impressed with the ship, but the journey means more, the hours spent with the four of them together trading bits and pieces of different languages around because that is what they do now.





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> We are finally off the Rebel ship and making planet fall. But then things did not get very far at all because Baze needed to take a moment. It's good, though, because this needed to be worked through anyway. For this series, this one is very angst filled. Next installment MIGHT see us jumping forward in time because I'm not sure I can write anything meaningful about getting this whole thing off the ground and going. I almost think it might be better to just skip to the part where it's working now, but we'll see where the muse takes me.

It's raining when they finally arrive on the planet after a long journey in the old and rickety ship that Bodhi and Jyn have spent so much time pouring over, fixing and then tweaking until it probably runs better now than it ever did. Baze should be impressed with the ship, but the journey means more, the hours spent with the four of them together trading bits and pieces of different languages around because that is what they do now. Jyn and her flat, passable Jedhan that Chirrut chides her about, but Baze only offers smiles and warm suggestions, all the praise in the universe, which Chirrut then fusses at him over because how will she ever learn if they don’t correct her. Yet how can Baze bring himself to criticize her when a new voice speaking in Jedhan, even if it is halting, makes his heart swell to twice its size? How can he be anything but glad that their language can continue in this way, passed from one person to another? How can he possibly say anything that might dissuade her?

And then Bodhi will take his turn, leading the three of them--more and more it seems like Jyn is not interested in being left out of anything and has even started joining them in the morning to go through the training though not meditation yet--in the twists and turns of his family language, which is lovely but terribly imperfect on Baze’s tongue. Chirrut is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, and he enjoys talking circles with Bodhi while Jyn glares. Baze lets them help him with his Basic, perfecting it so that he might not be as hesitant to employ it when it is needed. Jyn, normally snappish and short tempered, has all the time in the world when it comes to helping him it seems, the spikes of her anger becoming soft enough to bend a little, her patience increasing with each passing day.

All of that is wonderful. All of that makes his spirit soar in ways that he has not felt in so long, since days spent in the temple among the only family he had ever known, hand laced with Chirrut’s, surveying their world. It is wonderful, but it somehow is not quite as wonderful as the rain that greets them when they land. It is not the steady, soaking rain of Eadu or the infrequent but drenching downpours of Jedha. This rain is warm and light, almost soft as it lands, and the sun remains out instead of being covered with clouds. If he squints, Baze thinks that he can see the beginnings of a rainbow, its colors smeared against a sky that is blue, a horizon that is green with foliage, the kind of world that he has never imagined he could have as a home, the sort of world that they would pass over in the mercenary ships and people would start to talk about how lovely it was, how it was nothing like their world. Sometimes it felt like all the people in the universe who took to killing for money did it because of a mutual hatred of sand, the need to get away from it before it slowly rubbed off all their skin and then their muscle, until nothing but bones were left and then dust. Dust to add to the sand. They left before their homes could destroy them and became the destroyers instead. 

This planet is nothing like any of those sand places. He can tell that with just one glance. If destruction lingers at its core, in its forests, in its streams, it is some new kind that he has never tasted before, a kind that maybe he can best.

Baze watches Bodhi stand on the ramp as though stuck, face tilted upwards, eyes closed as the drops patter against his face, the edges of his lips quirked upwards in an almost smile. The scene makes him look much younger, and Baze wonders if he was one of the many Jedhan children who would crowd into the streets after the rains had come, laughing and stomping in the puddles. Sometimes the children were able to get away from their parents altogether and escape into the thick of the downpour itself, just enjoying the uncommon experience of water falling from the sky, their whoops and shouts rising above the city like the bells of the temple, loud enough to drown out the deluge, loud enough to drown out everything, a fever pitch of childish glee covering all of NiJedha like a blanket. Baze takes a moment to try and imagine Bodhi as a child, big eyed, dark hair plastered down by the rain, running through the alleys and shouting at his fellows in his family language, altogether happy, altogether safe. This image of Bodhi Rook, potentially the last child of Jedha that Baze will ever know, smiling into the rain now as he might have done then is the sort of thing that pains him to not be able to share with Chirrut so he tries to memorize every bit of it to whisper to him later when the day has worn down and such quiet moments can be appreciated fully.

In stark contrast to Bodhi’s reaction, Jyn looks annoyed, arms crossed over her chest, poncho on and hood up so that she keeps the rain off in much the same way that she tries to keep everything at arm’s length, not sure how to react, how to let it close, much more comfortable with skating the edges until she discerns that it’s safe to approach. Baze wonders for a moment whether the rain, even this incarnation of it, brings painful memories of everything that happened on Eadu with her father to the surface, but he will not mention it unless she does. That is another thing that he has learned during their time together. When Jyn gets too full up, she will talk. Sometimes it’s just a wayward word, but sometimes it is a long outpouring of everything that is bothering her, normally a torrent set loose while she works or trains with them. She doesn’t like to be interrupted, doesn’t necessarily even want acknowledgement. It seems like she mostly just wants to release it all so that the pressure doesn’t overwhelm her. Chirrut will press sometimes, and she will close up, snap shut like the sarlac plants in the temple garden, and pout until the mood passes. 

Getting to know her, Baze wonders how Saw Gerrera ever could have raised this girl and then left her behind, how he could have thought that was the best thing for her. Had she been their daughter, his and Chirrut’s, he never would have let her out of his sight, would only have had soft lessons and gentle things to show her, would have caught her in the cup of his palm and told her “Not yet, little one” when she tried to stray too far into danger, drawn to it like a moth to flame just like Chirrut. Baze is good at guarding those who do not seem to have sense enough to guard themselves; he has been doing it as long as he can remember. 

This is all another wish for a life that can never be, but knowing that does not make him regret the thought. He would very much have liked to protect all these not children--not his children but still somehow his now because he cannot deny the love, the care he has for them and none of Chirrut’s warnings work--from the hurts that have gotten them here. Baze remains grateful to the Force for allowing them to survive Scarif, for giving them this chance that they have, a chance that by all rights should not have been possible. This is enough. This should be enough. It is greedy of him to want more, he knows, but he also cannot help but think that this small piece of contentment was owed to him, that there is more in the wings he should be able to ask for and receive, especially when the Force allowed so much else to fall into ruin. It is not a condemnation of the Force, not anymore, but it is a quiet reckoning, a way in which he allows himself to watch the scales balance after so many years of ripping his heart out. Chirrut might call this blasphemy if he spoke of it aloud, would almost certainly click his tongue at him, which is why he keeps quiet, tries to keep it in rather than let it wisp through their connection, make his husband worry about Baze’s faith. Or, worse, make Chirrut doubt his own again.

There is nothing to fear because Baze does believe. He just spent years with his eyes shut tight because he didn’t want to see, because it hurt. Even when Chirrut was there, busy reminding him of the Force, how it worked, how it existed in everything, was of everything, but still was not quite what Baze wanted it to be, kind and good and in control. No, he knows. It is more an underlying energy in everything, a twist and a turn, a possibility. The Force did not fail them, it preserved underneath all the bad, but Baze has always had trouble not taking slights personally. And everything he knows, everything he feels about the Force does not take away the bitterness of previous years, especially not when he lingers on things like the injustice that was delivered on Bodhi, and Jyn, and Cassian when they were only children, when they deserved nothing but light and love and kind words, a kind world that had been stripped away. 

Kindness he can give. Kindness grows in the flowers of his heart and twines into his hands and falls from his lips with every word he speaks no matter which language it is in. Chirrut cannot even fuss at him about it because it is the one thing he has never run out of even when the universe was at its darkest. Baze Malbus has been many things, but he has always tried to remain kind. When it mattered, when it was needed. It was the bit of himself that he tucked away and swore to never tarnish, the bit of himself that eventually led him back home after years away, the bit that Chirrut first forgave when he returned. The bit that, he thinks, has always been the most loved.

The sound of Jyn sighing brings Baze’s attention outward again. He takes a moment to study his husband who has his hands cupped, letting the rain pool there, and then smiling as it escapes through his fingers, getting a feel for it; testing for purity he would probably say if anyone asked him, but Baze can tell by the smile that it is more than that. Chirrut is basking in the moment, probably remembering days spent huddled together in corners of the temple, the rain a background noise while they learned the shape of each other, the awkward fumblings of second and third and fourth times, the lazy almost haphazard adventure of getting to know, and then later, older, the comfort of coming together again, being as familiar with the other’s body as their own. Yes, there are many good things that can be associated with the rain, he thinks. More than enough to cancel out some of the harder, starker memories.

When Baze finally steps onto the ramp, the last one out of the ship, he is struck dumb at how weightless the water seems on his skin. He thinks, looking out at the planet, and the rain, and the people he adores, that this is surely just a dream. This is too much good at once, and it cannot last. They cannot have found this tiny tucked away planet unravaged by the war, unclaimed by either side, where even bounty hunters fear to trend because of strange stories whispered about it being haunted. Yes, he has asked the Force for many things in his life, a long litany of wants and desires both altruistic and selfish--Chirrut’s love, Chirrut’s eyes, Chirrut’s life, Chirrut, Chirrut--but he never thought it could repay him in this way with this boon, and he is scared that it will fall apart, turn into miles of crumbling sand, turn into torrents of rain and ships in the sky, turn into blaster bolts around his ears and blood in the sand and a switch. 

The switch. 

Baze closes his eyes against the memory, hands clenched into fists by his sides, and he feels through the Force more than anything when Chirrut approaches and then his hand, wet from rainwater, is tight around his wrist, steady. “You can let that go, love,” Chirrut says in Jedhan, voice loud enough to carry, stern, but soft at the edges where it needs to be. “You can’t carry everything. Not even your shoulders are broad enough, you’ve lost all those pockets, and I want your hands to hold.”

He has let go of so much since Scarif. It seems like every time Baze turns around, he is releasing something else, letting it fall away to the ground around him, leaving a trail of detritus he cannot be responsible for anymore. If he holds it too tightly, it will stifle the growth of the flowers. If he clings to it too much, it will darken the wave of the force. If he falters here, if his feet cannot carry him, he cannot move forward, and he will be stuck between selves, no longer Baze Malbus the assassin and not yet Baze Malbus the good man, Baze Malbus the devoted, just a shell, a shade. This is the precipice. This is the crux. A switch and a pool of blood and a wrenching in his heart that did not stop until the pain burned through him. Everything else he brought to Scarif remained there or was lost between the darkness and the awakening in the bacta. This is the only thing that he has not left behind.

There is water on his face, but it is not rain. 

The hand on his wrist has slid incrementally into his own, prying his fingers open until Chirrut can worry the tips of his fingers across the lines nestled there, can trace letters on his palm, words of love and comfort as well as the stern admonishment to just let go. Baze has never been good at letting go. When the temple fell, when it was laid to waste around them and nothing they did was enough to stop it from happening, nothing they did was enough to turn the hands of time and bring their lives back, Baze slept--alone because he would not allow his husband to stay out in the open like that--in the rubble of the training rooms for three months until Chirrut convinced him that he could not stay there, that the weather was turning as surely as the mood in the streets and one or the other would finish him off if he did not make some move to guard himself against it. 

“If you won’t let me protect you”, Chirrut had said, his face the stone mask of displeasure and irritation that he could sometimes get, “then you have to at least concede to protect yourself because you carry my heart, and it is hurting very badly. I cannot have it far from me. It wanes.” And Baze, of course, had followed to the rooms that Chirrut had somehow managed to procure. Chirrut who could always find the strength to continue no matter what tragedy had occurred, who let himself fall into pieces only in the very darkest corners, only when no one needed him, only settled into the expanse of Baze’s arms.

Baze’s eyes are still closed, and he can feel the flicker of Jyn’s kyber crystal, the little jolt of worry that shoots through the Force from her, and he knows that he should reel it back for them, but he is caught in the flood, unable to struggle out from the waters carrying him along toward disaster. “I just need a moment,” he manages in Jedhan, not sure whether he is talking to Chirrut or Bodhi and Jyn, trying to assuage their disconcerted pulses in the Force, unsure as they are about what is happening, what to do. It strikes him that they are like children who have caught their parents out in the middle of a weak moment and finally see that they are not the stone giants they have always considered them, that they are fragile and capable of crumbling as well. If those stone giants can lean, can fall into the sand and slowly be etched away, then what can they themselves possibly do to stand against the weight of the sadness in the universe.

Chirrut clicks his tongue, but it is less in irritation and more in a knowing way, the same sound that he used to make when he would find Baze huddled under trees in the temple garden in the early morning, meditating because that was sometimes the closest thing to sleep he could get when the worry stacked too high, higher than the temple walls, higher than the statues in the sands, higher than anything, everything in the world. “We just need a moment,” Chirrut repeats, and his words swirl gold across the pale colors of the Force, send out tendrils of steady reassurance. “Jyn, wasn’t there an area you wanted to scout?”

“Yes,” her voice is hesitant, and Baze knows that it is not just because of her lack of experience with the language.

“You and Bodhi should check it out. We will follow.”

Baze can only see the switch, can only see the red in the sand, can only feel the heaviness of Chirrut’s body in his arms, a heaviness that is different from all the other times that he has held him because it speaks of something dire, something final. While he cannot bring himself to look, he imagines Jyn’s glare, the way her mouth sets when she doesn’t like something, when she thinks she is being excluded by people she cares about, worries that perhaps they are done with her now. And he imagines that he can hear Bodhi fidget, the way he worries his hands over each other as though washing them, one time, two times, as many times as he needs in order to brush the nerves away. Sometimes it seems like he will never stop, and they just let him continue because it seems wrong to still him, to force him to act like anyone other than himself. He hears the way that Jyn, finally, lets her breath out in a rush, petulance trying to smother her concern because she can only allow herself to care a little bit at a time. 

“Ten minutes,” she says, and the flat tone is out of her voice now. There is something commanding to her Jedhan, Chirrut’s intonations through and through, and that word rises in the back of Baze’s mind again, the Jedhan for daughter, but now he really cannot ever say it because they will catch him out then, all three of them. “In ten minutes we’re coming back if you’re not there.”

The fingers on his palm remain, light, tracing more words as well as shapes that mean nothing except an attempt to ground him. Chirrut knows that he is floating, pulled away and out, adrift in the wave of this memory that will not leave him but has never risen so forcefully to the top, never dragged him down in quite the same way as it does now. Baze doesn’t understand, can’t quite reason out why it would seek him out in this moment, in this space, but it does, a cold, clenching coil that he cannot wriggle free of, that he sinks into like stepping into sucking sand, down, down until he reaches the bottom. If there even is one.

“Ten minutes,” Chirrut agrees in a voice that matches Jyn’s, that accepts her ultimatum and offers the follow-up promise to it. His husband is a man of flashing words and pretty thoughts and a quick smile, but he keeps his promises, he stands by what he loves even when it cannot find the strength to stand on its own. He has always been this way, light on his feet, deceptively fickle, steel to the core and loyal despite the flights of fancy in his mercurial mind.

“Come back,” he spells onto Baze’s palm as the sounds around them are just the rain, still falling lightly but the sound of water on the metal of the ramp, and it splashing in the puddles on the ground, is stark now, and Jyn’s heavy gait, each footfall a declaration, akin to a child plucking petals off only Jyn’s words are not, “he loves me, he loves me not” but “I don’t care, I do, I don’t care, I do,” and the much softer, hesitant pace that is Bodhi’s, shuffling, trying not to bother anyone at all yet still strong enough to carry him anywhere he needs to go. Baze listens to his not children move away into the thick of the planet around them, and worries. He should not let them go alone. He should not let them out of his sight. That happened on Scarif, and Jyn’s leg still pains her, Bodhi’s skin shines with scars, and Chirrut who never left his sight but left his side. And there his mind falters, flashes back to the switch, to the sand, to the moment the light went out of Chirrut’s eyes altogether.

“Stop!” Chirrut writes, punctuates it so that there is no way he can ever imagine it as anything but a command. The Force is a muddled, confused thing around them, a palette smeared with the gold of Chirrut and the red of the sand and the gray of Eadu and the flash of pain. It was quick, but it was everywhere, Baze can remember that much when he reaches too far, when it rises too high, a watermark against his soul. 

There are hands on his face wiping at the rain and the tears, mixing them together, brushing them off, and he focuses on the feel of the calluses that he knows so well, the skin that is practically his own skin after all these years, the skin that he loves best. “Baze, open your eyes.” Chirrut’s voice is thready at the ends like he is having a hard time holding himself together, and Baze can understand why considering he has not been stoppering anything, letting it all flow out, coloring the Force bond between them, careless and heartless and not tending to anything. He, who is supposed to be kind, has been hemorrhaging pain into the air between them without a second thought.

“Baze!” There is that snap, the same one that Chirrut employed when he didn’t even try in one of their sparring sessions because Chirrut had been injured the previous day, when he had gone down easily without even a hint of a fight at all, a move unworthy of both of them.

Baze opens his eyes and finds his husband’s face, worried frown, eyes focused just a little too far to the right, but blue as ever, and he feels small for letting himself sink, for letting the rush mislead him right back into that red sand. It seems to wrap vines around his ankles, heavier than any piece of ammunition he has ever hefted. “I’m fine,” he lies, and they both know it, but Chirrut, famous for giving into the temptation of I told you so’s says nothing of the sort.

The hands on his face remain, but their grip tightens just a little as though his husband is trying to physically keep him from drifting. It helps. Focusing on the contact, the press of skin against skin helps. “Baze, you cannot carry it any further. You cannot carry it here. It will drown you. It’s a Force planet. It’s only haunted by what haunts those who find it.”

At first Baze doesn’t understand the words because they don’t fit. This place is lovely, scattered with trees that are green and full and lush, the sort of things that they fought to keep alive in the temple garden, set to watering during the long months when no rain fell and then had to protect from the deluges, and the rain here is light, nurturing rather than bruising. There is still that hint of a rainbow in the distance, color clustered together as light refracts. How can a place this lovely be what is hurting him? Why is every world that Baze Malbus sets foot on riddled with pain? Or is it him carrying pain from world to world, infecting them with his own soiled soul?

Or, he thinks, as Chirrut’s thumbs press somewhat reproachfully into his cheeks, is it possibly something else, something between the two. 

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” Chirrut starts as the pressure of his thumbs releases just a little, and then he is stroking them against Baze’s cheeks along with the words. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.” Each time he pauses for a beat, waiting, but Baze has not found the words yet, is still fighting out of the quagmire encasing his brain. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.” Chirrut traces the word for love on Baze’s cheek this time. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”

“I felt you go,” are the words that fall from him when he manages to open his mouth, though they are not what he had expected. He had meant to lapse into the mantra, to pick up his end of it, to chant in time until the large hurt--the switch and the beach and the red sand and the burning blistering pain--had all been shoved back into its box for another day, but the box has disappeared. There is no box. There is nowhere for Baze to hide it so it tumbles out and across them both, drenching them in much the same way that the rain does now that they have been standing in it so long. It is not how hard the water falls that determines whether it soaks through you but the duration of time spent in it, after all.

“I said come back. You didn’t come back. I said don’t go. You went.” His voice shakes and cracks with the effort to still the words, but they don’t stop. They continue to fall, and he wonders if it is the rain that has gotten cold on his face or just the memory. “I felt you go, love. I felt you fade, and then you were everywhere, but that was not what I wanted because I was selfish. I could not imagine a world in which I would never know your hands or your mouth again. So I clung, and you stayed.” Gold. Rose gold against the Force, the color of Chirrut’s flesh flushed and wanton, the color of Chirrut’s skin in the morning light that would come in through the temple windows, turning him into a piece of art while he slept, while Baze just watched him, marking his breathing and the twist of his face as he dreamed. Gold and blue. Blue like his eyes. A color that Baze resented and then fell in love with as well until he could never see anything blue that didn’t remind him of Chirrut, didn’t immediately send him into rememberings of nights spent huddled together under the stars, wrapped around each other for warmth, whispering stories and prayers until it got late enough that their vulnerable feelings didn’t seem so exposed in the night air. 

“I couldn’t let you go. Not even.” Baze blinks, and his cheeks are wet with tears again as he falters in his attempt to continue forward, to admit to the next thing, the thing that he isn’t sure Chirrut knows because they haven’t really discussed this until now. Baze has been tending the rest of them, mending broken bits--leading Chirrut back to the Force, offering Jyn a hand, finding Cassian in his prison, helping Bodhi sort his mind, they have been so busy, so productive together--but he has been avoiding this gaping wound, and now it is overflowing, there is no time to pay attention to anything else.

Chirrut has closed his eyes, but that does not keep the tears in, and Baze thinks of how seldom he sees his husband cry because turning despair into laughter has always been Chirrut’s trick, shrugging it off and continuing on, looking for the light in everything and pointing it out. He cries very little, and it always pains Baze to see. “There was pain,” he says simply, “but it did not last long. Baze, I was there. I wish it had not hurt you. I wish nothing ever would.” It takes a moment longer than normal, which is another clear indication of the fact that Chirrut is emotional and off guard, overwhelmed by the situation as well, but he cups Baze’s cheek fully with a hand. “It was never my intention to leave you behind. I knew you would follow. It hurt me, but I knew you would follow.” 

To death goes unsaid. To death and beyond. It does not need to be said. It is in every touch, and it is in the Force swirled around their feet, overlapping them, threads and cords and knots all between them so that sometimes when he looks at it Baze cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. He used to be able to when they were young, but they have woven it together so tightly over the years that there is no way to sort it out now. Even if there was, he would never want to try, lost in this tapestry they have created even when bits of it are burned and parts of it are not lovely, the overall picture is worth maintaining. He believes in the threads that bind.

“Baze, I am sorry, but the switch,” Chirrut falters when the word makes Baze flinch. “The switch had to be flipped, and the Force led me to it.” 

Baze remembers. How nothing could touch Chirrut on the walk there, how he watched, heart pounding so hard he thought it would burst, holding his breath, needing, waiting, as he walked and nothing was anywhere near him, as though he were protected. “The Force protected me,” Chirrut said that last day on Jedha, though he had said it many times before, and Baze had followed up with, “I protected you,” as he always did, half out of spite because his husband would never admit to it, especially not in front of people. But it was both. All along it was both, and the walk on Scarif proved it while the escape from Scarif, the drifting in the bacta, the fact of being here, now, when they should not be just cements it further. 

“The Force protected you,” Baze says, and he doesn’t know what it is because it is not just admitting to a thing, it is a gift, part and parcel, even more of his faith reaffirming itself. And the wave is starting to ebb, a little at a time, not pulling into itself, not hiding in a corner, but releasing like a knot undone.

“Just as you have.” 

He settles a hand on the back of Chirrut’s neck, fingers tracing into the hair that has gotten longer than he normally keeps it, and Baze wonders, fleetingly, whether his husband means to grow it out or if he has just been distracted. Every time he tries to imagine an unkempt Chirrut the image fails him, shimmers away into nothing. “You’re welcome,” he manages, though his voice lacks the exasperated tone that he normally sinks into that sentiment. Baze has never needed to hear thank you, not really, prefers the back and forth, prefers the gratitude in each touch, and the irritated little noises that Chirrut makes when he is smothering in his care.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” Chirrut starts either not wanting to rise to the bait or just wanting to settle the weight off once and for all. 

“The Force it with me. I am one with the Force.” The words are right there this time, they come easily, and Baze closes his eyes, gives way to the repetition of the prayer, one of many that remain locked in his heart and his mind, neither time nor distance were able to wear any of them away. As he relaxes, he finds it, the cool, green thrumming of the Force around and through and just all over the planet. This, he thinks, is what Chirrut must have been talking about. It is rough and wild and thick, so thick. Forgotten. Unused to life, unused to beings wading into its pool so that it picks up on and amplifies what it can get ahold of though he is not sure why. The Force does what it wants to, after all. They can put boulders in its path, but it will just flow around them. All is as the Force wills it.

It is no wonder that there are stories about this place being haunted when the thick Force reflects everything back, over and over, strengthening it with each pass. Baze is a haunted man walking, mind and soul heavy with everything that has happened over the years, grateful and loving but so very weighed down by his own thoughts, more than enough for the Force here to work with, more than enough for him to feel it careen into him as hard as any blow that has ever landed on his physical body throughout his life. 

Chirrut’s fingers trace his cheeks again, comb into his beard, wander across his lips while he speaks. Chirrut, strong enough to see and avoid the trap or maybe just forgiving enough of himself to not be ensnared by it, to walk across it--like walking across that cursed beach--and appreciate it for its mastery. Baze isn’t sure, can’t quite figure it and doesn’t know if it actually matters all that much. What does matter is how the rain falls, light and warm again, across their bodies, and how it feels like every drop washes off the darkness, makes the red sand recede. 

It is done. It is over. They have gone through that. There is no need to carry it. It stops his hands from holding other things, it clutters up spaces in his heart where the flowers bloom, and keeps him from recollecting dear, precious things. He has more people to remember the habits of now, and he needs to. He needs to be able to sit by himself later and recollect exactly how Jyn tilts her head when she laughs, hiding her smiles away as though afraid someone will steal them, how Bodhi gets still and quiet when he sings, looks even stronger and surer with his family language on his lips, how Cassian brightens when people acknowledge him, when people see him instead of only looking at his ploy. 

And Chirrut. Baze has so many more moments with Chirrut that he wants to keep close. This darkness is taking up all of his spaces. 

The Force is green and gold and blue all over, all around them, and they are breathing in sync, no longer speaking in turn but at the same time so that the words overlap and it is hard to differentiate one voice from the other. And Baze sees it. At the corners, in the tapestry, not the red of the blood on the sand, but the red of Jedhan sand, rust and brown and just a little bit of orange swirled into each other, a color whose only name is the name of his moon. The color that he has always been in the Force. “I’ve always liked the sand,” Chirrut said once, arms around Baze’s waist while he read, and Baze had made the noise deep in his throat that meant go on so he did, “it resembles you.”

Baze thinks he could easily lose himself here, in this moment, in this lightening, this finally letting go of a thing that has been haunting him since Scarif. He could just sink into this and enjoy it always, be consumed by it, by the close pressure of Chirrut’s love, still being traced over his skin, he could linger here and never move again.

Until Jyn’s voice cuts through everything, less a bell and more a crack of thunder. She is not to be overlooked, she is not to be denied. “Is that necessary?” And there is such exasperation in her voice that Baze cannot help but laugh as he opens his eyes and steps away from Chirrut, who drops a hand to his waist to catch his clothing, never ashamed.

“Your daughter,” Chirrut accuses, but Baze knows better, shakes his head. Ours, he thinks, and it winds across the bond so that Chirrut clicks his tongue at him. Then Chirrut is turning on the echobox and starting off down the ramp again, tugging Baze along with a hand fisted into his shirt as though he knows exactly where he is going but is concerned about Baze getting lost, as though he would not follow him anywhere.

Into death. Into death and beyond. Eventually. For now into the heart of a planet so thick with the Force that it screams, shouts, sings, blesses them at every turn so long as they do not bring darkness with them, and Baze feels lighter without that steel box, without its terrible contents to press at him and pester him anymore.


End file.
